Let’s assume you have created a revolutionary plugin that solves the real problem very easily. Or a theme that is perfect for any kind of business. So, what will be your next step? Obviously, you want to earn a good amount of money from this, right?
But in this competitive world, nothing comes without proper promotion. If you’re a believer that “Great products sell automatically,” then you’re certainly in a fool’s paradise.
Well, it’s true that good products sell themselves. But at the initial stage, you need to promote your product by reaching people.
In this article, we’ll walk through how and where to promote WordPress themes and plugins in a proper way so that you can reach your goal. Let’s get started with this comprehensive and necessary guideline.
Table of Contents
Having created a useful plugin/theme, you must create a detailed plan for promoting it. If you don’t, you’ll never reach your goal. For this reason, you need to develop a comprehensive plan and set relevant goals.
Additionally, all tasks should have a time frame. By doing so, you will be able to accomplish your goals on time.
Well, there are a couple of key types of promotional methods you need to implement:
We will cover both On-site and Off-Site promotional methods, but Off-Site methods require extensive planning and drive traffic. So, Off-site will be the priority of discussion here. OK, so let’s get going.
The most common and basic way to promote WordPress themes and plugins is to update them regularly. Need to have a clear call to action in your promotional section so that it attracts potential buyers.
However, there are more effective ways that you can follow to know how and where to promote WordPress themes and plugins. These will be explained below. Don’t skip a word here if you’re the needful.
First Things First – A Dedicated Website: Creating a dedicated website is crucial, while there are premium plugin marketplaces that will let you sell plugins. Moreover, to build up the brand value of your product and company, having a dedicated website is a must.
Start Affiliate Program Right Now: Remember, to start an affiliate program, at least you need to have a medium customer base. If you have, then don’t wait anymore. With an affiliate program, you can start offering exactly that feature to your customers. An affiliate program (getting your customers to refer the product to others) is best to promote your WordPress themes and plugins.
Attract Customers by Blogging and Preparing Video Tutorials: Blog/article writing and video contenting could be the two best possible to attract customers to your site. But remember, don’t be too salesy; rather, be more informative with your blog or video.
Start Email Marketing: Get the most out of your visitors. When you collect email leads from your users (through pop-ups, opt-in forms, or other means), you will be able to communicate directly with them. And guess what? The ROI on email marketing is the highest, with 4200% (WordPress $42 for every $1 spent).
Make the Most of Social Media: Most people spend their time on social media these days too much. By consistently providing relatable, on-point content, you will gain more traction than you could ever imagine.
For the long-term sustainability of your product, you need to be consistent with off-site promotions. Off-site promotions may help you build the root of your promotions, but on-site promotions will play a big role in flourishing your WordPress themes and plugins to their true potential.
Here are the most important ways to promote off-site:
Based on successful plugin and theme developers’ experience, we’ll go in-depth on why these promotional methods are vital. Many data references will also be provided to show you how you go with these promotional methods.
Reaching out to people can have a number of purposes or objectives. We are, however, trying to emphasize two of those purposes.
More opportunity doors could be opened by outreaching out to people. However, here our focus will be on these two purposes. Well, let’s get to the business.
The reason behind communicating with other website owners is to get backlinks from the relevant industries. Backlinks are important for any website to get ranked higher.
Backlinks are all about credibility, as you are supposed to get them from other websites. It defines how much credible your website is to Google. Google prefers those websites that have authentic and high-quality backlinks.
Despite the constant Google updates, the importance of having high-quality backlinks is the only aspect that is still highly relevant and undeniable.
If you’re a WordPress product owner, you should target backlinks from websites that cover similar topics or blogs containing WordPress. Relevancy is a must to get the backlink from other websites that result in getting the audience from that particular website to yours.
The more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google. Also, their studies show that most top-ranking pages get ‘followed’ backlinks from new websites at a pace of +5%-14.5% per month.
Ahrefs
In order to grow your business, outreaching out to influencers is also a must. Either an influencer could be a top blog or a well-known person. Usually, influencers have a wide range of audiences in their box, so they can play a vital role in promoting your WordPress products.
The majority of brands (59%) have a standalone budget for content marketing, and 75% of them intend to dedicate a budget to influencer marketing in 2021.
Influencer Marketing Hub
Follow the below steps while reaching out to an influencer-
Determine Your Goals: Get prepared for the influencer marketing campaign with a proper plan of action and objectives.
Seek For Right Influencers: You need to find the appropriate influencer based on your WordPress theme and plugins.
A Good Relationship with Influencer: Once you find the right influencer for you, try to build a good relationship with him/her and offer your proposal with a proper outline.
Make the Strategy as 1 – You and Your Influencer: Once your influencer agrees to your proposal and is willing to do work with you, elaborate the whole plan to him/her. Make him/her the part of a plan. It’s unethical to expect anything biased about your product from your influencer; rather, go with an honest review of your product.
Set an Evaluation Process: To see the results that are getting your influencer, make a record of it. And check that on a daily basis to know and understand where you’re right now and what could be the upcoming possibility.
You might wonder why I’m suggesting these hassles instead of not just using any paid ad on Google? Well, there is the reason-
According to Shopify, Influencer marketing ROI is 11x greater than banner ads.
And that is the reason why influence marketing is better than any other paid common marketing channel possibility.
You’ll get plenty of plugin directories that host both premium and free plugins. Premium plugin directories trigger your sales for sure if your product is worth selling. Remember, you’ll have to pay a healthy amount of commission money from every sale through this premium platform.
WP Hive, however, is the free plugin directory that hosts WordPress plugins. It’s trustworthy and cost-friendly.
By promoting your products through plugin directories, you can attract more audiences to your website than ever before. Your audience will get in-depth insights about your products that results in the possibility of getting purchased.
Guest blogging is an important aspect to get ranked high on Google SERPs. It’s mainly suitable for new newcomers. So, write and publish relevant blogs on a regular basis. But getting ranked without any backlink (because of not having a guest post) is quite hard. Publishing the same content that you wrote to a popular website (if they allow it) comes with three major benefits.
Because of getting backlinks to your site, your website’s site authority will increase along with the organic traffic.
Will create some long-term brand value for your product.
You can promote your product in a subtle way.
For example, a case study is attached below on how GrooveHQ turned its fortune around with a guest blogging strategy.
GrooveHQ’s website used to get very less visitors. They started guest blogging in a bid to change the fortune, and sure enough they got the result.
They published a guest blog on Buffer, and within an hour of the post being published, they had 1,000 new unique visitors. That soon turned into 5,000, and then 10,000, and before long, 20,000.
Today, that post has been shared online more than 10,000 times, and has cemented guest blogging as a cornerstone of their growth strategy.
So, guest blogging can be a rescuer to getting ranked on Google SERPs. As a result, always seek the website to get backlinks by getting quality backlinks. Moreover, you can also find and publish your blog post on those websites that people are visiting to get WordPress-related information.
Right now, over 42% of all websites worldwide are built through WordPress. So, without any doubt, WordPress is the largest way to build a website. Moreover, because of having these many statistics of people using WordPress, people always seek creative tools and ideas.
As a result, collaborating with a top WordPress blog will help you reach an audience you never thought of. So, collaborate with any of these kinds of WordPress blogs and write a product review on it. However, it can be any plugins or themes.
It could be the most popular way to promote their products for the WordPress product owners who are launching their new WordPress plugins or themes.
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So, there’s nothing to worry about, how to promote WordPress themes and plugins because product reviews are here. It will surely help you out a lot to promote your WordPress themes and plugins.
That’s why online product reviews are highly countable and trustworthy for almost 88% of people out there. It works better than a personal recommendation.
For the maximum number of WordPress blogs, you have to pay a one-time amount to get reviewed your product. It’s not indicating that these will be biased or something; instead, it will work as a true introduction of your product for a long period of time.
It’s not easy to sell a WordPress plugin or theme. If there isn’t enough information about the product on the internet, it becomes even more difficult to sell it. Nonetheless, as long as your product solves a real problem, you can create a positive buzz about it.
As we’ve discussed, there are two main ways to promote WordPress plugins and themes, on and off-site promotions. Additionally, we’ve shown you how you can use both types of promotional materials to make your theme or plugin a success.